The truth is, that Lady Gethin may have had little concern in all these “Reliquiae Gethinianae.”  They indeed might well have delighted their readers; but those who had read Lord Bacon’s Essays, and other writers, such as Owen Feltham and Osborne, from whom these relics are chiefly extracted, might have wondered that Bacon should have been so little known to the families of the Nortons and the Gethins, to whom her ladyship was allied; to Congreve and to the editor; and still more particularly to subsequent compilers, as Ballard in his Memoirs, and lately the Rev. Mark Noble in his Continuation of Granger; who both, with all the innocence of Criticism, give specimens of these “Relics,” without a suspicion that they were transcribing literally from Lord Bacon’s Essays!  Unquestionably Lady Gethin herself intended no imposture; her mind had all the delicacy of her sex; she noted much from the books she seems most to have delighted in; and nothing less than the most undiscerning friends could have imagined that everything written by the hand of this young lady was her “first conceptions;” and apologise for some of the finest thoughts, in the most vigorous style which the English language can produce.  It seems, however, to prove that Lord Bacon’s Essays were not much read at the time this volume appeared.

The marble book in Westminster Abbey must, therefore, lose most of its leaves; but it was necessary to discover the origin of this miraculous production of a young lady.  What is Lady Gethin’s, or what is not hers, in this miscellany of plagiarisms, it is not material to examine.  Those passages in which her ladyship speaks in her own person probably are of original growth; of this kind many evince great vivacity of thought, drawn from actual observation on what was passing around her; but even among these are intermixed the splendid passages of Bacon and other writers.

I shall not crowd my pages with specimens of a very suspicious author.  One of her subjects has attracted my attention; for it shows the corrupt manners of persons of fashion who lived between 1680 and 1700.  To find a mind so pure and elevated as Lady Gethin’s unquestionably was, discussing whether it were most advisable to have for a husband a general lover, or one attached to a mistress, and deciding by the force of reasoning in favour of the dissipated man (for a woman, it seems, had only the alternative), evinces a public depravation of morals.  These manners were the wretched remains of the court of Charles the Second, when Wycherley, Dryden, and Congreve seem to have written with much less invention, in their indecent plots and language, than is imagined.